


Crushing Prison

by skcm



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, F/M, POV First Person, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-05-31
Updated: 2010-06-04
Packaged: 2017-10-09 19:56:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skcm/pseuds/skcm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Single elven female seeks tent partner to aid in personal conquests of an intimate variety.  Has good references, will travel.  Likes long walks off short piers, prominent noses, and fantastically brolicious coiffure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Morning/Mourning

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much, wives, for the enormous amount of hand-holding I got from both of you. Love.

The room's dark but I flicker with heated sparks, an angry candle, a lit fuse, a fireball.  I touch his hand before he can even see me.  He doesn't move a muscle.  Whispering his name hard into his cheek, he wakes with a startled look and then an easy smile.  Then he touches me back.  We make love in the pitch black space, unaware and mutually forgivng, though maybe it _was_ envy that drove me into his quarters the night before my Harrowing.  Desperation or something, I guess.  It doesn't matter though because it's done and we're invisible to each other now.  His coddling kisses and my muffled shrieks and groans swirl into nothingness, a veritable dream world of used-to-be.

And yet, he is there when I wake up.  Jowan's voice is strained and ragged like a sunken moth's last mournful backstroke across a basin of fetid water.  I taste the scheme in the pitiful utterances of _Please, Ama,_ and words like _trust, friend, life, love_.  They hold meaning, for him.  I want to hold him, square and stubbly chin solid, upward.  _Friend_.  Jowan is my friend.  I trust him.  His magic doesn't hold a torch to my own.  Irving likes me more.  _Jowan_ likes me more.  It is a lie.

But I need to place him in the sunlight, turn his face out to see the world and tell him it's okay.  I don't.  I do what's bad for him.  I am an enabler, alone now without a best friend and without a sometimes-lover, without sheets crumpled at clammy ankles and curling toes and that still morning before my fleeting moments as a real mage.  As for the two of us, we trudge our own courses, bravely opposed to destiny.

Destiny smells like wet dog when my idealism slinks into the corner, and I see things checkered dark and ominous.  This blight is an opportunity, though.  Like Al says, _bringing people together_.  I like to add that they might not want to be brought together.  He'll learn too, I think.  I also think he'll learn to like me...to care for more than a shared glance because even though Morrigan is not the most vibrantly social creature that spider thing she does is impressive, but Morrigan and I laugh at times.  He's sad though, the saddest eyes I've seen since my mother left and I looked into the mirror with my own brown eyes and found only dirt and sour remains.  Once at camp, I looked at him a little while he was asleep.  He was curled into a ball like he was striving for warmth.  Or comfort.

I tell Morrigan a story on the road out of the Wilds.  She laughs this time, because it's all about magic.  A spectacle I liked to put on as a child, the smoky cremation of the various ill-fated animals we found in our travels along trade roads before I went to the Circle.  They'd been hit by carts, pummeled by boots or trod upon by horse hooves, but I felt bad.  I burned them in my own private showing.  No longer stiff or dirty, they met with the sky in a hazy cloud.

Maybe the Maker was looking, but it still felt like only I was there.

Alistair shudders at the thought of my magic being used _outside_.  He misses Duncan so hard, and I can tell.  I know that despair.  I shake him, abruptly, to get his attention.  It's out of place.  When I ask, he tells me I don't have to, I didn't really _know_ him very long, it doesn't very well matter, he's sorry.  He's got to try as hard as me at this, or I'm just gonna give up.  But Maker, his hazel eyes are entrancing like what you can't reach.  There is some mystery to this, with an ever unmet, ever tantalizing conclusion.

Take me in your arms, I urge him, with a gaze that _must_ get the point across.  Then he darts across the small tavern because the last block of cheese in all of Lothering entices him.  I turn to Leliana with a frown.  She is perceptive.  She _knows_, or perhaps I am naked and she's actually giggling at that oddly-placed freckle, the one under my left breast.

When I am awake again, he is hovering like a makeshift tent over me, then back to the fire, then to Mongrel.  Briefly, he looks at Morrigan's ramshackle sleeping area.  We talk about my dreams, which he keeps calling nightmares like they're really that bad.  I mention that the Fade is a treacherous place, regardless of whether or not there are darkspawn yelling at me the whole time, and he shrugs.  _Thank you, though, for warning me,_ I want to say like an obedient and precious child, but instead I snap in two and ask him politely to let me sleep longer.  I sit up in the tent and pretend with myself that I'm having a nightmare, while I anxiously ponder how I could have done better.

_Join me, Alistair, in my tent, right now, because your hair is so nice._  I sleep well past sunrise.


	2. Underskirts and Breakfast Sausages

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leliana tries to wake a sleepy Warden, with little luck.

This morning, I feel like a wrinkled pile of unclaimed garments.  Camp is so bare, especially when I think of the Circle and how fast time just _goes_.  Back in the tower, there were hallways with mossy patches along the walls.  Some of them smelled exactly like those stupid soaps of mine, smuggled in by a kind associate from the next floor up.

Blond and earring-bedecked, he had a glamour all his own, and made me wish at the time I could handle a fling.  The soap mage is so vivid in my memory, remaining untouched after time.  He was a tall man with nothing to lose, and so beautiful.  Sometimes I think attachment is my bane.

 I hear shuffling beyond the thin tent walls and scrape around at my surroundings, trying to find a few rags or a cloth to place modestly over myself.  _Andraste on her mother's teat, I hope it's him_.  A large, dark hand reaches bravely between the canvas flaps and the next thing I know, the Qunari is staring down the bridge of my nose.  Maybe he's just looking at me with great concern, but it feels like a solid glare.

He hands me one of my slips from the wash pile, now clean.  Leliana's effervescent laughter erupts from somewhere near.  _Balls._  Why is Sten handing me underwear?  _Pashaara _echoes from outside the tent like a rampant drum beat.  Each ripple of the word makes my heart pound more and more, though the word only resounds like a hollow cage of an insult.  I react with a jerk.

Slapped aside, Sten's fingers dangle like plump breakfast sausages.  I clench my fist and shout with every expendable vocal resource as the bard flicks a gaze in my direction.  Almost immediately, her pouty mouth curls into a wicked smile.  _Lah lah lah de dah!  Warden, the sun is up!  Put your skirts on and join us around the camp in a carefully arranged salutation to the day!_

She doesn't say this, but I pray into my bedroll that she will someday so I have a reason to hate her.  What she really tells me is that there's a Blight about, and so I had better join it or it will eat me _right up_, so I toss my underwear out of the tent and hit her square in her pretty blue eyes.  She grins and starts talking about cool cotton on a summer night.  I throw a blanket over my shoulders and shrug away into relatively shameless slumber.


	3. The Templar's Nightmare

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: For my lovely wife, Sian. Thank you for being who you are.

It's dark tonight, looks like rain, and I'm already shivering.  Baths are sort of excessive with this cold weather, but Wynne insists I take one every two days, _at least_, and she wrinkles her brow and gets this weird look that tells me she really means _every_ day.  Then she smiles a little and I _know_ that's some sort of wordless jab.  I hope Morrigan doesn't catch wind our talks, she doesn't need more ammunition against me.  Amaleena tells me every time that her insults are harmless, and why can't I shrug them off like _all those arrows_ and when she says that her eyes get sort of big and scary, and very brown.

Earlier today,  I was injured on one of the top floors at the Circle of Magi.  Got a few scrapes here and there and a _big_ chunk on the skin of my right ankle was torn off where a maleficar bit me.  _Ankle-biting_.  Hmm!  I was rather promptly commanded to stay at camp until I healed, and so here I am, with Leliana.  Ama was cold about the whole situation, barking at me to stay put, and setting off with Wynne for logs and frogs, or whatever it is mages get out in the woods.

The Tower was so dim and serious, and _holy Maker_ am I glad to be out of _there_, but the air at camp feels a little bit the same with all the humidity.  Not to mention the bugs biting at my arms sting just as hard as that mage-bite.  Ugh.  Probably just going to drift off to sleep with no fire, an incredibly sociable qunari, and a bard who won't shut up about shoes.


End file.
